8th July
Many years ago my father contributed a chapter,
intellectually rigorous but lucid, to a book entitled ‘Why I am Still a
Catholic’. Nowadays I would broaden this to all denominations. For me the answer to the question lies in
the bleakness of death. Death makes a nonsense of all our love-based edifices
of family and blood. Eventually all those bonds will be dissolved, and that is
inescapable. For many of us death softens itself in the padding of ‘a good
innings’ and ‘a full life’. But sometimes it flaunts its cruelty, reducing
small children to tears as they walk behind a coffin. Today I was a mourner at
such a funeral; a family where a mother and father had lost a child, their
little grandchildren had lost a loving parent.
Everything we try and achieve through the people we befriend
and mate with, and the children we engender - their vulnerability freighted
with the intensity of our love - can seem a completely empty ritual in the face
of death’s power. Today, the question loomed in my mind - what is family love,
ultimately, but passengers trying to provide comfort to one another on a ship
that has already struck the iceberg, and is heading for the bottom?
This bleakness is unsustainable without hope. This may be
just a case of wishful thinking, of wilfully holding onto something that exists
beyond proof. But we all know that we all feel, we don’t only think: our
intellects are often little help to us. As I sit in my garden this evening with
vivid colours from the flowers receding away to the lawn and orange sun in my
face and a soundtrack of birds and distant sheep bleating, I can feel, just
fleetingly, a certainty (not a conclusion, nothing that cerebral)
that the loveliness of the scene is not all there is, that our minds and
emotions are, in a way we can’t yet articulate, copies and hints of something greater
outside and beyond, something of infinite duration beyond the transience of
these earthly bonds and loves. Coupled with this conviction that we are made in
the image of God, we also have the solid scriptural record of a poor carpenter’s
son who defeated death several times and finally rose from his own tomb. In the
bleakness of this life’s struggle,
these are the reasons why I cling to the word ‘this’. And why I am certain that
another life extends beyond.